


To Save the Many

by BlackjackKent



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Renegade Commander Shepard, Ruthless (Mass Effect), Sacrifice, Torfan, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-04-02 12:50:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4060666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackjackKent/pseuds/BlackjackKent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lieutenant Shepard’s orders on Torfan are simple -- destroy the batarian pirate presence there at all costs -- but the odds are against her and her platoon is heavily outnumbered. With time of the essence, no backup in sight, and thousands of colonial lives riding on her success, she must accept the consequences of whatever ruthless sacrifice the situation demands. </p>
<p>(MEBB 2015 entry.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Save the Many

_Dirt. There’s dirt under my hands. That’s the first thing that filters in as my eyes flicker open._

_No, not dirt. Mud. It’s started to rain. I’m curled on the ground, nothing but pain from the gut down, damp slickness inside my armor where it sliced into my belly._

_This must be hell. Or perhaps a nightmare, a fog-drenched, tree-lined nightmare. Any minute now, it will be over; I’ll wake back up in my bunk on the Dallas. They’ll all be alive again. Everyone will be alive. And it won’t be my burden to bear…_

_I squeeze my hands into fists and wait for the dream to end. But still it continues on, and the rain pounds on my back and drips through my hair. It blurs my eyes until I can’t see._

*****

I remember laughing when we got our orders for the assault on Torfan.

I was sure, at the time, that it must be some kind of joke. There’s nothing on Torfan; the place is more or less an iceball. There’s plant life here and there, of course, and a few scraggly forests struggling along in a permanent damp chill. But it’s not the sort of place you’d want to go on vacation.

“Even the batarians don’t want a shitheel place like that,” I told my platoon sergeant that morning. Flicking my wrist, I tossed the datapad of orders at him with a grin and folded my arms across my chest.

Without blinking, he snatched the pad out of the air, spun it deftly on his fingers. “They do if there’s tactical advantage in it, Lieutenant,” he answered as if nothing had happened. That was Martin Kendrick for you; he took everything in stride. Nothing phased him. It made him a damn good sergeant and a valued advisor. -- especially for a rough-edged Lieutenant like myself, given mostly to chaos and destruction when the situation allowed.

_Ice and fire,_ I’d heard our squads called us. _Kendrick sets ‘em up and Shepard knocks ‘em down._

“I assume you’ve read the orders in full, ma’am?” Kendrick went on, gesturing with the datapad. “This is no normal raid. The batarian base there was connected to the attack on Elysium. They’re very dangerous. This is a critical target for Alliance interests.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” My grin twisted, turned wolfish. “Don’t get me wrong, Sarge. We’re gonna burn the place to the ground. You know we never do a job halfway.”

He nodded curtly, snapped a hand up in salute. “Aye, Lieutenant. We’ll be ready on your order.”

“Then let’s go make some noise.”

*****

_There’s a rumble of thunder behind the heavy rattle of the rain. I’ve twisted my ankle but I might still be able to walk._

_I just don’t want to…_

*****

The plan was to launch a surprise attack on the batarian base during the night, as soon as we landed. However, we figured out pretty quick that it was not going to happen like that. The intel we’d had going in was very clearly wrong.

“We’ll want a team of scouts out to verify, but I don’t like what I saw on the way down,” Kendrick told me grimly as we unloaded from the drop shuttle. We’d put down in a dark, forested area a klick or so south of our target, nearly spitting distance as these sorts of operations go; there was a heavy oppressiveness to the air, as if we could feel our enemies breathing down our necks. “The batarians are dug in solidly, and thermal scans showed at least three times our number. Probably more, if any part of the installation’s below ground.”

I had seen the same during our trip down, and was no more pleased about it than the sergeant was. “All right. We’ll hold here for the night, see what the scouts say. Not the first time we’ve fought a force that was better by the numbers. Worst case scenario...we have to break a couple necks for every one of ours.”

If my bluntness bothered him, he didn’t show it. “And best case, we pull out?” I could tell by his tone that he knew the answer before he asked.

“We can’t pull out.” I shook my head. “We were sent to do this fast and quiet. By the time another set of squads got here, it’d be too late for that colony they’re eyeing. It’s us or nothing.”

He huffed out a breath through his nose, sending twin jets of fog into the air. “I’ll have the team set up camp.” There was a hard, determined set to his jaw as he turned away from me and lifted his voice to call the platoon to attention.

To their credit, our squads didn’t complain about the change of plan -- nor the hard ground or the relatively exposed position in which we had to camp. It wasn’t the first rough night we’d ever endured. So they fell to the new task without griping; the worst I heard was a few comments about the chill.

“Colder’n a witch’s tit!” Zoe Duncan snorted, tossing her pack next to her bedroll and flopping down on it with a grunt. She was our platoon gunnery chief and always the first to start the team jawing during downtime. “Maybe the four-eyed bastards’ll be all froze up when we get to ‘em.”

“If they ain’t now, they will be soon,” called one of the corporals from the far side of her tent. He spun his rifle in one hand to show off the cryo attachment, drawing a ripple of appreciative laughter. “We’ll shut ‘em down, and the whole Alliance will know we’re the ones that saved Demeter.”

“You really think they’re planning to go after another colony?” asked Damian Salvadore. Full of questions as always, the rookie engineer leaned out of his tent, resting on his stomach and elbows to join the conversation. “I know what the intel said, but Demeter’s--”

“A farming colony,” Zoe finished for him with a shrug. “Not a place for you or me, maybe, but if they smear Demeter like they tried to smear Elysium, a whole lot of the Alliance is gonna go hungry.”

Salvo chewed over that for a bit. “Then we’ll smear ‘em first,” he pronounced gravely, and the older soldiers chuckled.

“Damn right,” Zoe answered with a laugh, slapping him on the back. “Lieutenant Shepard’ll work her magic with us like always.” She turned and looked at me. “Right? What do you think, L-T? We going to win this thing?”

I looked up from the barrel of the sniper rifle I was cleaning. Should I have told them then, what they were up against? Should they have gone in knowing how bad the odds might be? In the end, I just grinned at her savagely, tapped the clip casing shut with a snap that echoed in the quiet of the woods. “Well, I don’t know, Zee, ‘cos I don’t see the future,” I told her. “But I see the past pretty well, and I know I didn’t train up any losers.”

Zoe’s eyes glinted as she smiled. “No, ma’am!” she agreed cheerfully. “We know our job. We’ll put a lid on ‘em, whatever it takes.”

A cheerful shout went up around the group -- and was quickly silenced by Kendrick, who was standing off to one side, speaking in a low voice with one of the scouts. “Platoon! Ten-hut!”

The team fell silent and still, almost as one body. I nodded approvingly. A well-oiled machine, they were -- smart as whips, bold as brass. The best that the Alliance had to offer, men and women I trusted with my orders and with my life.

“Keep it low, kids,” I told them gruffly. “We’ve got enough work ahead of us without losing the element of surprise.”

“You figure they know we’re coming, Lieutenant?” Salvo asked me.

Zoe punched him in the shoulder encouragingly. “They will if you open your trap too wide, rookie. Get some sleep.”

“Aye, Chief!”

As soon as I could, I extricated myself from the jaw session and made for Kendrick’s side. “What is it, Sarge?” I asked him in a low voice, turning us away from ear- and eyeshot of the platoon. “Something’s got you spooked.”

“No, ma’am,” he said evenly, breath pluming out in a steady stream of white smoke in the cold. “Just going over the scout reports of the base.”

“And?” I raised my eyebrows at him.

He was silent a long while. “And I’m glad the team is in a good mood tonight,” he said. “Because tomorrow’s going to be bad.”

******

_I try to walk. My feet slip and I crash headlong into the mud. It coats my face, cakes my hair. The armor’s too heavy. I’ll never make it back to the rendezvous wearing it._

_Besides...I don’t need it. There’s no one shooting at me anyway. There’s no one left._

_My fingers are numb with cold, my arms heavy and dull with bloodloss, but I fumble open the catches on my armor. It clangs into the mud with a splash, and I feel the weight on my shoulders lighten -- and the blood start to flow freely from my stomach’s uncovered wound._

“Lieu--...nant Sh---ard…” _A voice crackles in my earpiece._ “--nt Kendrick? ...Anybody?”

_“I’m here…” I try to say, but the words choke in my throat and I lurch forward, step by bloody step through the rain. “I’m here. I’m here...I’m here…”_

_And I am. The pain tells me that for certain. But I shouldn’t be. Why am I not dead like the rest?_

*****

Kendrick and I circled the edge of the camp, watching as the platoon unpacked the essentials of their gear. As always, they quickly settled into small groups, the cliques I’d watched them form over the time we’d worked together. Some were the boisterous, the rough-housers, the ones who were like me, here to fight and destroy because it was the thing they knew best how to do. Some were the quiet ones, more intelligent, more tactically-minded like Kendrick. They were unlike me and I valued them for it.

And some, the older ones mostly, kept together on the edge of the group and watched their younger compatriots with quiet gravitas. They, more than the others, had a certain savage glint in their eyes that told me perhaps they already had an inkling of the terrible odds we faced. Soldiers can sometimes smell a bad fight, like a dog scenting a storm on the wind.

“The outlook’s that bad?” I asked Kendrick, after a long silence had stretched between us.

The sergeant nodded, grim-faced. “A frontal assault’s exposed as all hell, and the rear entryway is a bottleneck. They were smart in how they set up their defenses. Combine that with their numbers advantage and it’s not a pretty picture.”

“Damn,” I mumbled, rubbing a hand at the back of my neck. “Normally I’d say let’s try to get a couple poison gas cans in their ventilation system, soften ‘em up a little. We’ve done it before. But in order to make that work, we’d need…”

“A good entry and exit plan from the rear.” He frowned. “Which we don’t have. The jaws of the nutcracker’ll come down quick enough behind any team that goes in that way. And in the meantime, we’d need a hell of a diversion team from the front, and whoever draws that duty is going to get cut to pieces. But…”

“But the batarians would go down with us,” I said, blunt and firm against his caution. The silence that hung between us felt sharp-edged in the cold.

He nodded slowly, his lips drawing into a thin line. “Assuming the gas did its work...yes, ma’am. They would. We could theoretically level their numbers in half an hour.” His face was unreadable, his deep-set grey-green eyes steady on me.

“That’s it, then.” I set my jaw. “If there’s no other option, that’s how we do it. And we’ll tear ‘em to goddamned shreds if it kills us.”

I expected he would object to the ruthlessness of what I was suggesting, but his unflappable steadiness never wavered. He may not have had my rough edges, but he knew as well as I did that we could not leave this place without accomplishing our mission. We were sixty people. Thousands of lives depended on shutting this base down. It wasn’t hard to do the math.

So he just raised one hand in a salute, stiffened his back, and met my eyes squarely. “Yes, ma’am.”

“We’ll strike just before dawn. Keep the element of surprise if we can.”

“Yes, ma’am. And my squad will take the gas duty.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if unaware of the danger he was volunteering for, but I knew he felt the weight of the decision keenly and stood against it anyway. He was brave, and so direct in his bravery that I couldn’t deny it to him -- not that any place on the battlefield was going to be safe. So I just nodded at him briskly before looking out over the dimly lit camp, the shapes of the men and women I commanded barely visible in the darkness.

“Should I tell ‘em?” I asked abruptly.

“Tell them what?” he replied, and there was an angry snap to his tone, not at me but at the situation we found ourselves embroiled in. “That we’re lambs to the slaughter?”

“Something like that.” I scowled. “Hell of a ‘shepherd’ that makes me, huh?”

The poor joke drew a quiet, humorless laugh from Kendrick’s throat. “No, ma’am. Not this time around. You and I...I’m pretty sure we’re the wolves.”

*****

_I’m not religious, never have been, but I’m praying now, a hot raw plea torn from my throat without anyone to hear it._

_“God...please, God...please God please God please God…”_

_The mud is cold on my face and I’m pondering the idea of just not standing up again. The job’s done, after all. The job is done. I might as well rest. But the adrenaline, the survival instinct, is relentless. It’s the only thing keeping me breathing. My stomach hurts so badly I can’t think…_

*****

We hit them as the sun rose.

The base was a large, generic-looking facility in grey and brown and black; it looked as if it had been prefabbed out of a box, and stood out in stark square lines against the natural smoothness of the woods on either side and the white-pink glow of the dawning sky beyond. It was a monster of a place, really, no mere temporary camp but a real staging area, and by all appearances the batarians had been dug in there for a long while, nestled against a cliff that chokepointed unexpected visitors from the rear. The forward wall, lacking natural defenses, was encased in a heavy titanium facade which deflected any attempts at long-range assault.

It was a tactician’s dream if you happened to be inside it, and a nightmare if you were on the attack.

We had a few advantages, of course. Our scouts were professionals and had pointed up a number of possible assault plans the previous night. The most promising of these utilized a natural trench which ran parallel to the base (likely a dried-out riverbed) which gave us perfect cover to get up into line of sight with our target without placing ourselves too far out in the open.

Had we been better supplied with manpower and time, we might have been able to camp there indefinitely, slowly picking off any batarians who dared to show their faces. But that wasn’t our job; we were there to crack the nut wide open. Cover and discipline won’t save you if your job is to stick your head out and make a nuisance of yourself, and that was exactly what the situation boiled down to -- producing as much noise and worry as possible for the four-eyed bastards inside the base, in the hope of buying time for the rear attack.

If we could do that, the rest didn’t matter.

Kendrick had set off before daybreak, taking with him an elite team of five officers selected from across the platoon -- those best at stealth, at silence, and at absolute dedication. They’d disappeared into the mist without a word, obedient and direct, with the understanding that we would be in radio silence once they left the camp. Even if the pirates couldn’t decrypt our communications -- and intel thought that they couldn’t, although intel also thought this was a small forward operating base, and look where that got us -- they could still use any transmissions to pin down the locations of our teams, and it was vital that our entire platoon appear to be involved in the frontal assault. It was the only thing that would save Kendrick’s team long enough to set the gas charges.

I was forced to operate on trust alone, a fact that is never comforting for a commander even with the best of teams. I had to trust that Kendrick’s squad would do their job, to the death if need be, simply because I had ordered them to do so. And I had to trust that my own squad would follow me into the cannon’s mouth without flinching, just to buy them time.

We moved in silence, stealthily crawled out of the riverbed just as the predawn light began to creep across the clearing. Zoe had taken command of Kendrick’s usual squad in his absence, and she dropped out of formation under cloak with two of my infiltrator-class marines and approached the front wall of the base’s barricade.

_“Fire in the hole,”_ she whispered cheerfully over the comm, and there was a gentle hiss as she lit the business end of a brick of explosives. A moment later, the front armor facade blasted apart in a gout of flame like so much tissue paper under a blowtorch.

The tremendously satisfying boom of the explosion rattled my teeth, and while it didn’t break all the way through wall behind the facade, it was more than sufficient for our purposes, waking up every sonuvabitch in that place and bringing them howling out into the daylight. Before we could blink, the first squad of pirate shock troops began pouring out of one of the base’s exits.

“Take them!” I called. My boys swung into action, clashing with the oncoming foe almost as one body. Thermal clips split the air, clanging into the limited cover we were able to take in the form of debris knocked clear from the facade. And with that, we began the fight for our lives.

It only took a few minutes for me to realize that the odds were even worse than Kendrick and I had anticipated. My boys were outnumbered two to one by the forward shock squad alone, which meant that the base’s complement had to be at least six times our number. A poor situation in any event, but given the impossibility of retreat, it became downright murderous.

“What gives?” I heard one of the privates mutter at my elbow. “They didn’t tell us we were takin’ down goddamn Goliath!”

I darted forward, dived behind another pile of debris, lifted my rifle in a sweeping arc that caught one pirate in the belly and another in the leg. Off to my right, I saw Zoe track my movements, clip the latter man in the head to finish him off.

_“We’ve kicked the hornets’ nest for sure, ma’am!”_ Her voice was breathless over the comm as she sank back into cover. _“I think there’s too many of them!”_

“Plenty for each of us, then!” I barked back. “Watch your flank!” The batarians were trying to encircle us -- a pretty good strategy, given their relative numbers. “Keep moving! Don’t let them close us off!”

One of the pirates near my position heard my orders and laughed, a high-pitched keening bray. “Come on, Alliance!” he called in my direction. “We had you beat before you started!”

Trash talk. A sure sign of an amateur merc rather than a professional soldier -- but an excellent avenue for further distracting them from their rear. “Fuck you!” I returned, leaning out of cover long enough to scope out the one who had spoken. “We can do this all day!”

More batarian laughter, seeming to come from all sides. “We’ve got four hundred men inside this complex. What do you have?”

Well, at least now we knew the odds. One of my men cursed under his breath. “We’re gonna tear you to pieces!” I shouted. “You’re not takin’ another colony!”

“Sure we are. We’re gonna squash you like bugs, and then we’re gonna squash Demeter too. You Alliance types always think you have it all figured out. _Dhuk’tah!_ ” The pirate punctuated his expletive with a sniper shot to my left. One of my marines howled and dropped into a still heap in the dirt.

In that moment, everything changed. A strange sort of clarity abruptly came over me, the peace that came with absolute certainty. They were planning to attack Demeter. They were planning to smear the two hundred thousand people living there. And against those numbers...it truly did not matter if we survived.

And knowing that, I no longer felt any fear. “We are going to end you,” I growled and exploded from cover like a tornado.

My first shot went straight through the nearest batarian’s head and into the one behind him, knocking them both to the ground with a spurt of bright red blood. My next was a concussive blast that cleared a path in front of Zoe and her half of the platoon. Perhaps she had seen what I had seen -- that the odds no longer mattered -- or perhaps she just didn’t want to miss out on getting her licks in, but either way, she didn’t wait for my orders this time. She boiled out of the corner she had taken refuge in, a pistol in each hand, firing like mad.

“All forward!” I yelled, and the rest of my men fell in behind us.

And I don’t pretend to know what the batarians thought of this little display. But I’m pretty sure I could see fear in their eyes. I didn’t blame them for that. There is nothing so terrifying as an enemy that is no longer afraid to die.

*****

_I’m out of medi-gel. There’s no way to staunch the wound. I am going to bleed out here if I don’t find help soon._

_But I’m so tired. So goddamn tired. If bleeding out means I can lie down and rest...then I’ll take it…_

_Halfway through struggling to my feet, I topple forward again like a felled tree, my weight sinking blissfully into the giving softness of the mud. No more fighting to stay upright. That’s it._

_I’m done…_

*****

The blast that took me down came as I was spinning out of a melee attack; in fact my omniblade was still half in its unfortunate target’s chest when another of the pirates caught me sideways with a concussive shot at close range.

My shields had held up remarkably well during the first stage of close-combat fighting, despite the number of shots I was receiving for every one that I dealt, despite the blows that were felling my comrades steadily on either side. But the strain of this last attack proved too much; my shield generators overloaded with a rattling shock that made my teeth clack together and sent a dizzying pain through my whole body. Given a few seconds, perhaps I could have reset the systems and kept fighting -- but a few seconds I did not have.

The pirate sighted down on me, fired again. This second shot took me in the gut, and with no shields to diffuse the overwhelming impact, my armor shattered, one wide piece driving deep into my stomach.

For a terrifying moment I thought I had literally been sliced in half. But I could still feel my legs -- far too well -- as I hit the ground. The armor fragment jammed deeper and twisted as I rolled out of the way of a pair of heavy boots, dragged myself behind cover and out of the immediate line of fire.

Zoe shouted something I couldn’t understand. I tried to shake my head, to encourage her to keep fighting; the motion made sparks fly at the corner of my vision. _Push on. We can’t give in now…_

Static hissed in my ears, followed by a tinny, breathless voice. _“Lieutenant? This is Kendrick.”_

“Sergeant…” I whispered. My tongue felt thick and heavy, my words a little slurred. “What’re you--”

_“We did it,”_ he rasped. _“The charges are set. Everyone inside the base is dropping like flies…”_

The sense of elation this news brought was dulled by shock and bloodloss. “Good work...Sarge…” I said hoarsely. “Can you...can you get…”

I’m sure he could tell I was injured, but he didn’t question it. Surely he had made the same realization as I, by now. _“No, Lieutenant,”_ he said flatly. _“Our exit’s cut off. And we’re already breathing the gas.”_

“Oh.” I dipped my head, avoiding the flash as a grenade went off to my right. “I’m...I’m so sorry, Martin. I’d hoped--”

“ _I know,”_ he answered. _“We both did. But we knew it’d come out this way. You were right to send us. You were right to send us all.”_

I knew I was. But that didn’t make it feel any better to listen to the death all around me, in my team’s bodies and Kendrick’s voice and my own lungs. “They were going t’ hit Demeter,” I muttered. “They...had it all planned…”

_“Yeah. We saw the strategic data. We’re having a look at their files while-- while we’re waiting,”_ he said, stumbling over the words just slightly. _“Lieutenant, I--”_ He spoke in a sudden rush. _“I need to ask you a favor.”_

“What is it?” A batarian boot kicked me and I groaned, rolled and lifted my rifle to fire up into the offending pirate’s face.

_“Lieutenant...if you make it out of this…”_ His voice was diminishing in volume now; I could hear him struggling to make it loud enough for the comm to pick up. _“You know what they’re going to try to say. They’re going to try to paint this like a slaughter for slaughter’s sake. They’ll try to call you a brute and me an accessory, and they’ll call this a crime -- against the batarians and the Alliance.”_

His voice strengthened, just for a moment. _“But we know better, Lieutenant. We know this had to go down this way. We knew it from the start. Do not let them make you apologize for it. Do not let them make you believe we died for nothing.”_

Tears smarted in my eyes, the pain from my stomach making me tremble all over. “I won’t, Martin. I swear to God...I won’t.” Odds were I wouldn’t even survive the battle anyway, but we both knew that wasn’t the point.

_“Good.”_ There was a hiss of static that almost muffled the word. _“It’s...been an honor serving with you...Shepard…”_

And then he was gone. The signal broke as his breath expired, as his omnitool registered the death of its user. I could feel blackness hovering on the edge of my vision and struggled against it to raise my rifle again. One shot...two shots...three shots...three batarians fell against the wall of the base.

The stream of men from inside had dissipated; Kendrick’s team had done their work well. The base had fallen.

So had we, of course. “ _There’s only a few of us left, Lieutenant...we can’t hold out!”_ one of Zoe’s corporals cried over the commline.

“We have to!” I snapped back, my voice cracking harshly. “We’ve got them. Just a little more. A little longer. Finish the job!”

A heavy rasp of breath, a plaintive cry. _“Oh, God, Shep! They’ll kill us all!”_

I swallowed thickly, felt my throat stick as I tried to breathe. “If that’s what it takes…” I whispered.

Another concussive blast struck next to me, sent me flying with a roar. My head struck the ground as I landed and the blackness took me.

*****

“Lieutenant?”

The voice is familiar but fuzzy, distant, as if I’m hearing it from the other end of a commline. “...Wha--”

“Lieutenant! You’re alive!” It’s Private Salvadore. I recognize his voice. His hand touches my shoulder, rolls me so my face comes up out of the mud. “Lieutenant Shepard? Can you hear me?”

“I hear you…” I whisper.

He tries to smile but his face can’t seem to make the proper movements. He’s covered in blood. One hand holds a pistol with an empty clip, trembling in the rain-soaked air.

“Where...where are the others, Salvo?” I try to sit up. Every muscle protests and I sway, feeling ill.

“Chief Duncan and Harry Ellis are in the base. Three prisoners. They’re-- they’re guarding three prisoners.” He stammers over the words, his eyes large and afraid. “They sent me to find other survivors but...I think we’re the only ones left.”

The only ones left. I came here with a platoon of sixty and am leaving with four. A desperate, grief-stricken wail sounds in the back of my mind. But we had our orders. We did what had to be done. I have to hold onto that, because if I lose sight of it for a moment, all those deaths become worthless. I swore to Kendrick that I wouldn’t let that happen.

I stagger back into the base, leaning heavily across Salvo’s shoulders. Duncan and Ellis look at me with hollow, exhausted eyes, each of them standing with guns trained on the batarian prisoners kneeling on the floor. Where Salvo looks frightened and incredibly young, they merely look empty. We have spent ourselves utterly in the service of this mission.

“Salvo...go back to the camp, scrounge our transmitter,” I mutter. “We need to get a message up to the Dallas for pickup. In the meantime, I’ll figure out what to do with these bastards.”

Salvo casts a quick, nervous look at the prisoners, then nods with evident relief and retreats wordlessly back out into the rain. The nearest batarian to me spits dismissively, mutters an unfamiliar phrase that can only be a curse. I look back at him unblinkingly. I’ve got no patience for his defiance, not after what I sacrificed to defend against him and his kind.

I lean unsteadily against a nearby stanchion, looking at the prisoners with hate in my gaze. “You know,” I say hoarsely, “we were sent here to clear this base out.”

Zoe nods. “Yes, ma’am.” Her jaw is set hard and I can tell her fury is aimed as much at me as the batarian pirates. _You did this,_ she seems to say with her glare. _You chose to put us all to the blade. Our blood is on your hands._ And she’s right. But the facts remain. Our orders remain.

“To clear it out,” I repeat harshly. “That means empty. Not a single batarian left inside.”

The silence for a moment is absolute. Then, in a single smooth motion, I pull my bloodied pistol from its holster, sight down the barrel, squeeze the trigger three times. The prisoners hit the floor with dull thuds, one after the other.

Ellis sucks in a breath, and Zoe’s hard gaze turns fiery. But neither speaks, neither objects. Are they in agreement, I wonder? Or simply afraid of what I am on the heels of such sacrifice, and without Kendrick’s calming influence to steady me?

I can’t blame them, if it’s the latter. I can’t even find the strength to regret it. I know what will come of all of this already. They’ll call me “butcher,” tear me to shreds for the work I did here, for the men I lost. But the batarians are dead. Our orders are fulfilled. Our colonies are safe.

“We did our job,” I tell them firmly, turning away. I can hear Kendrick’s voice in the patter of the rain outside. _Do not let them make you believe we died for nothing._

“We did our job. Let’s go home.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Here's my MEBB entry for this year -- a look at Torfan which I've had rattling around in the back of my head in various forms for a while now. Specifically this is a fleshed-out headcanon for my renegade, Jenna Shepard, and is an effort to explore what might drive somebody to do the sort of things that earn them the nickname "Butcher." Thanks so much to fistfulofgammarays for her awesome artwork! (And a shoutout to kepeshyakshichampion for beta help! :D )


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